As you can read in this blog, our spices are not organically certified. That doesn't mean our farmers don't work according to organic values. In fact, they all believe it's important to keep their soil healthy and their crops pure.

But for a small-scale farmer, such a certificate is practically unaffordable. Moreover, such a quality mark isn't always reliable, as a recent report on pesticide use in the coffee world shows. 57 coffee products from 45 different brands were analyzed, including organic brands. Pesticides were found in 72% of the samples. The organic brands were no exception. We therefore prefer to be sure ourselves that the spices we buy are free of toxins.

That's why we have the spices themselves tested in laboratories for (residues of) chemicals and pesticides. And unfortunately, sometimes something is found that you really don't want in your spice. For example, we once had to reject a harvest because it had been contaminated with an unwanted pesticide during grinding. We also analyze other unwanted

Such situations are very annoying for both us and the farmer, but they also keep us sharp. We subsequently took measures to ensure that this would not happen again so quickly.

Why we have also made exceptions sometimes

In our assortment, there is one spice for which we have made a small exception, and that is our paprika powder. Paprika powder is one of the most difficult spices to grow sustainably. Due to its natural sugars, many pests find it very appealing. Harvesting is labor-intensive, so farmers prefer all fruits to ripen at the same time. Also, the market prices for paprika powder and chili are very low, due to cheap production from, among others, China. Try competing with that as a small-scale farmer.

And that's why many farmers use, for example, artificial fertilizers to optimize their harvests. This is also evident from the recently published FoodWatch report, which showed that a jar of supermarket paprika powder contained no less than 18 pesticides, half of which are banned in the EU!

Our paprika powder comes from Hungary. This spice is very important in the cuisine there, yet unfortunately, hardly any farmers still grow that red powder in the traditional way. The farmer we work with, Peter Szabor, is very passionate about his paprikas and wants to grow them as sustainably as possible.

However, last year his entire harvest was threatened by a specific beetle that devours the entire harvest in no time if you don't fight it. Unfortunately, Peter has not yet been able to find an organic alternative for a pesticide. The bizarre thing about this story is that non-organic pesticides are subsidized. A strong lobbying effort. So even if he had found an organic alternative, it would have made his harvest much more expensive, making sales difficult.

That is why we decided to purchase this paprika anyway, despite the pesticide that was used. The agent is not banned in the EU, and letting the entire harvest perish seemed to us an even worse scenario than this crop protection.

However, it is our goal to work with Peter to see if there isn't another solution to this problem, so that we can also completely clean up this one chain from the use of unwanted substances.